FACULTY PROFILES

Lisa Trocchia, PhD
Program Director, Faculty, and Advisor, MA Transformative Food Systems

Lisa brings nearly 45 years experience as an educator to her role as Director of the Master of Arts in Transformative Food Systems at Prescott College. She is passionate about the role of food systems change in leveraging transformative social change, and continues to develop social network design, communication, and education as conscious approaches to activating equity, collaboration, and self-organizing. 

Lisa is a sensory ethnographer with research interests that integrate the performance of food, cultural foodways, and the modulation of affect embodied in food spaces. As an transdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Trocchia’s food systems perspectives are informed by expertise in communication theories, sociology, alternative economic structures, political and critical theory, and the study of social networks and change in complex adaptive systems. She holds a Ph.D. in the Social Ecology of Food from Ohio University. Lisa uses she/her pronouns.

Melvina M. Brown EdD, MBA 

Melvina uses she/her pronouns. She identifies as being of African American and Cherokee descent. Melvina has over 25 years experience in corporate and consulting environments with a focus on Supply Chain Management, Technology, and Finance. 

Dr. Brown  serves as the Executive Director and Founder of InnerSource Wellness Center and Urban Regenerative Sustainability. The center serves as both an education and healing center offering Permaculture Design Certification Programs; Holistic Healing and Esoteric Practice and Programs. Melvina holds an MBA and EdD from Wilmington University and a PhD in Sustainability Education from Prescott College. 

Kimberley Greeson, PhD

Kimberley uses she/they pronouns and is core faculty in the Sustainability Education doctoral program at Prescott. As an interdisciplinary scholar and educator, her research looks at the biopolitics of food and conservation; more-than-human entanglements, and decolonizing pedagogy. Kimberley is a curriculum specialistfor Uluha’o o Hualālai, a nonprofit that works for the cultural and ecological preservation and regeneration of Mt. Hualālai.

Dr. Greeson is a cisgender, biracial Asian American settler on Hawai’i Island (occupied Kanaka ‘oiwi land). Her pedagogical philosophy is one that seeks to (re)humanize education and examine power structures, which she acknowledges is an especially significant challenge in academia, as a system built on white supremacy and colonialism.

Kristen Sbrogna, PhD 

Kristen Sbrogna joined the Sustainable Food Systems program in 2022 and also teaches with the Outdoor Education Leadership program. She is currently a Visiting Professor in the Environmental and Marine Sciences program at the University of New England. Formerly, she taught interdisciplinary courses in social justice and sustainability for over a decade at Saint Mary's College of California. Sbrogna’s teaching is informed by her practice as a community leader in the non-profit field, including serving as executive director of La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley. In 2015, she founded Leaderful Strategies, a consulting firm that supports non-profit social justice organizations through structural transition and reorganization. Sbrogna holds an MFA in Creative Writing and earned a PhD in Sustainability Education at Prescott College. In her dissertation, Sbrogna developed a biocultural framework for crop transition in Northern California, reflecting her interests in sustainable diets and global food transition, biocultural diversity, environmental and climate justice, traditional ecological knowledge, and place-based methodologies. Sbrogna lives in Southern Maine with her partner, three children, and hundreds of other species.

Henry Anton Peller, PhD

Henry has a PhD in Soil Science from Ohio State University and is a full time farmer, soil science researcher, and soil carbon consultant. His research interests include agroecological systems in places such as Cuba, Haiti, Belize, and Central America, in addition to his 125-acre family farm adjacent to the village of Roseville in southeast Ohio. His farm includes crop fields, orchards, forests, wetlands, and prairie. The primary farm product is willow, grown on about 8 acres of lowland soils. Henry also grows produce on 4 acres, where he mobilizes an armada of soil health practices in zero-herbicide, minimum tillage production systems. Specifically, he sows cereal and legume cover crops each fall, terminates them using a homemade roller crimper and occultation tarps the following spring, and direct seeds or transplants fresh market and staple food crops using no-till planting tools. 

"My motivation to farm comes in many forms: respect for soil organisms, concern for the impacts of agriculture on water and climate, encouragement from friends and community, and the imperative to produce efficiently and generate sales."

Cirien Saadeh, PhD

Dr. Cirien Saadeh uses she/they pronouns ​​and is an Arab-American journalist and educator who works at the intersections of journalism, social movements, experiential education, and sustainability. She has written for local, national, and international publications and is committed to using journalism as a tool in the pursuit of justice for all historically disenfranchised communities. She produces and hosts the Radical News Radio Hour and is the co-founder and Project Manager of the Journalism of Color Training Center, sponsored by XITO – the Xicanx Institute for Teaching and Organizing. She is also is the Executive Director for The UpTake – a community news organization

Dr. Saadeh is the Department Coordinator for the graduate program in Social Justice and Community Organizing and for the undergraduate program in Social Justice Studies. She holds a PhD in Sustainability Education. Saadeh is currently conducting research at the intersections of journalism, social movements, and cooperative sustainability, as well as the applications of racial equity impact analyses to the practice of Journalism of Color.